Yes there has been a consolidation over the decades into few large, corporate operations. You can still buy fresh produce and other farm goods locally from the same people who grew them in “farmer’s markets” in towns and cities, but these are only in limited times of year and locations. For most Americans the food they buy and eat will have come to their supermarket from some massive factory-like supply chain, average distance of over 1,000 miles away, or something like that (I’ve not read up on this topic in many years).

The documentary Food, Inc. narrates a surprising and dark picture of the state of farming in the U.S., and it was filmed 17 years ago! So food production has progressed further into profits-at-all-cost corporate hands since then. Similar things happened with smaller, often local, goods stores disappearing during 1980s-1990s due to emergence of large shopping malls and multi-department corporate chains like Walmart and Target (you may see this referred to as the Main Street “ghost town”).

Every time I see these reports, I think of how Porky doesn’t seem interested in hiring fucking anyone for the supposedly open jerbs that already existed. This shit is nothing more than porn for shareholders and investors.

To expand on what Yogthos and RedClouds already said, the U.S. “consumer credit” system is also, effectively, mandatory participation from birth and you don’t ever get a choice in it later on. There are multiple private agencies who track and maintain records of U.S. citizens’ credit history. A typical person here will do business or apply for jobs at many companies over their lifetime which will check these credit histories and/or submit that person’s payment records to the agencies as part of the business (like mobile phone service contracts, credit cards and car loans, corporate landleeches and your monthly rent history, etc. etc.).

I think the way it works is, the first time you do business with a place that reports to credit agencies when you turn 18 or whatever, your identifying info is sent over and your personal credit history begins. It’s like having an account created on your behalf at a shady, unaccountable business from which your data can’t and won’t ever be purged (bonus: your personal info has a good chance of getting stolen from said agencies and sold on TOR forums every few years or so).

If a credit check is part of the employment process at some job, their HR department is using it to determine how responsible and trustworthy an applicant is expected to be. Banks and finance jobs always do this as well as other non-finance but high level jobs. Someone with large amounts of current debt or history of missing payments on rent won’t get hired at such jobs because they’re considered bad with money and desperate or irresponsible, a liability for theft and embezzlement as the employer would see it. Same principle when applying for places to live, low credit score or red marks in payment history = no housing for you.

The system has a bunch of stupid guidelines for maintaining a high ‘credit score’ that are taught as sage life advice in a lot of high school, home economics classes here, probably because this shit is so deeply ingrained in every aspect of life that it’s inescapable. That ‘credit score’ is a three-digit number ranging from about 500 to 850, it’s often listed with some minimum required score on housing applications and similar, it is used as a quick judgment on your history of borrowing from and repaying capitalist entities, higher number being better. It’s calculated by a an algorithm and nobody knows what the algorithm is because it’s an industry secret. The score is updated regularly and we can get a free copy once per year of everything on our personal credit reports from each of the three “main” credit agencies, if we request one.

Unless you’re so wealthy you can buy everything with cash, having no credit history at all or a bad credit history can significantly impact your life comfort and ability to find housing, so we are forced to play this fucked up game.

Add on-campus housing and food plan and it’s another $8-15k per year on top of that for in-state, maybe more now. And that covers the two main semesters only, summer and winter sessions have their own extra costs.

I was just reading that story before I typed that, like yeah 50k more workers getting thrown like dirt to the wind, and that’s just the planned layoffs reported thus far, because a gagglefuck of capitalist shitheads on Wall Street and their oracles are throwing tantrums about interest rates or whatever and the quarterly projections may not support the usual infinite growth on the workers’ backs this year. In other words, it’s been about 5-8 years so the working class is due for another squeeze in the ol’ vice as per usual with capitalism.

I’ve been seeing what must be the effects of this crap in the job listings for my area. It’s the most discouraging I’ve seen since like 2009. College degree or not, there’s little to choose from and the competition for the scraps is undoubtedly high once again. What’s also fun is I really don’t want the job I have now but if I quit I am completely fucked and would be getting a much lower wage even if I did find something else.

People are more convinced that inflation will keep falling, and their outlook on their personal finances has also improved.

The rate of inflation fell ever so slightly, my ‘outlook’ on personal finances is still “work my body and joints to dust until 5 years before biological death” but hey, I can maybe retire to a lavish life of discount bulk pet food and a cardboard box apartment paid for with 70% of my Social Security income like 2 days earlier than previous, now. Pop the fucking corks!

The job market remains strong

Strong for who? Strong for fucking who? Try getting literally any god damn job as a blue collar these days. Nightmare mode if you have psychological issues. Just fucking try and you will see how swell it is. That one blissful year or so of companies hiring any warm body off the street during and immediately after the COVID19 outbreak is over, the ‘getting a job’ process has been back to business as usual for over two years now.

By my own experience I would say it’s necessary and should be legally mandated as long as this fucked up Calvinist society and the majority of private businesses which gatekeep the ability to pay for housing maintain their bigoted stigma against destitute people.

If you’re looking for a job and they ask for an address, I find it hard to believe that shelters are set up to work as a “home address” so how the fuck you’d be able to apply for a job if you can’t find a way to piggy back on somebody’s PO Box and their home address for applications.

I’ve been there personally. I was advised by two separate people involved in state vocational programs and the shelter staff themselves to not use the shelter’s street address on job applications, if it’s avoidable.

Considering the potential “one shot” you get at most of these fucking employers/companies with the unaccountable Gestapo bullshit their human resources departments are known for, and not knowing whether they retain applications for future reference if someone applies multiple times, I decided to spend some of my dwindling money on a PO box. And even then I was questioned at two different interviews about it, not too invasively but enough to further fray my nerves in an already precarious situation I was desperate to get out of.

I couldn’t even get a fucking library card when using a shelter’s street address without being questioned about it.

Yeah I think the SESTA and FOSTA shit went down the same way, written up by the usual clueless skeletons in DC and only ended up pissing off a fuckton of internet users while accomplishing nothing. I’m not in the targeted demographic for this latest turn of the surveillance vice but I hope for you and everyone affected that it gets shot down in flames.

btw you need to edit your links, the target URL for all of them is currently the post itself.

He’s a snide liberal shithead and always has been. Back in 2018 or so when /r/breadtube was new, I remember the lost libs and socdem types there showering his name in praise because they believed he “moved people left” or some other delusional nonsense (to them it was ‘moving left’ just with Ronald Reagan as the starting point I think). They thought he was some kind of leftist because he shot down a few actual right-wingers in debates, a very low bar to clear for even a liberal centrist.

Then I watched his debates with Luna Oi and a separate one with some left-aligned guy whose name I forgot and he showed his whole pro-capitalist ass. The chat stream from his followers was no better. Probably half of them were regulars on /pol/ and had browser tabs open to that shithole, judging by the endless racist and edgelord remarks I was able to read as they flew by.

Fuck him and the horse he rode in on, and his followers too.